Play & Learn with Bottle Tops!

“I love these little plastic lids!”

Bottle Tops have brought so many wonderful and creative ideas to my kids play times.  I am amazed that they still manage to find new ideas for using them!

I thought I would share some of these creative ideas that may be transferred into your child’s play.

Start Collecting!!  

I think we have about 60 lids and still growing!  I recommend storing them in some way as I found that these ended up from one end of the house to the other! My kids had been playing with the lids for some time, when I discovered at pack up time, these lids were just left inside bowls or toys that they had been playing with.  The bottle tops did not have a home!

I involved my kids to help solve this problem and we came up with: recycling an empty ice cream container and decorating it with circles made from tracing around the lids, colouring them in and cutting them out.  We then used sticky tape to put them onto the container.

Let’s Play 

The bottle tops are great for a pretend breakfast cereal.  Use an empty cereal box, sticky tape the lid closed and cut an opening for pouring.  So much fun for imaginative play!

More Play Ideas 

Hours of cooking! Bottle tops are great for imaginative play, cooking and serving food.  My two eldest made flower cakes in a restaurant.

Pretend Bottle Top Money 

Pretend money for imaginative play shopping.

Creating

What else can be created?  My girls love making flowers.

More Creating 

Bottle tops are great for construction and building houses.

Making Words, Letters and Names 

Making letters that are in your child’s name, numbers  or even making their name.  That’s if you’ve got enough bottle tops!

Sorting

Bottle tops can be used to make patterns and predicting what comes next?  Sorting and classifying into groups of colour.  This is another fun way to help reinforce and learn about colours.  Kids learn through different modes of stimulus!

A bit of Maths 

Bottle tops can be used as a problem solving tool when learning basic number sentences. I love the size!  They are chunky, colourful, and great for little hands and kids seem to be drawn to them.   There are several numeracy activities where you can utilise the bottle tops.  I will be going more into detail how they can be utilised in numeracy activities in a future post.

Drawing

These clever little lids can even be used in making and creating pictures.   Tracing around the bottle tops to create drawings of flowers, caterpillars and the sun.  The ideas are endless!

The Imagination 

These lids always find a way into my girls play times.  This is something they created during their imaginative play.

Imaginative Play 

I captured this moment when the girls were playing.  They were scooping food into the lids and collecting them for something.  It just reinforces that these lids encourages the imagination and bring another element to creative play.

I love these bottle tops for learning because:

1. Kids seem to be drawn to these colourful and chunky lids and they can bring an element of fun and play to learning.
2. They can be used as a concrete tool for problem solving number sums.  They can also be used for sorting, classifying and predicting activities.
3. The bottle tops are strong, robust and great for little hands and fingers to manipulate which is beneficial for fine motor development.  Fine motor is important for strength and control of the hands and fingers for writing in school age kids.
4. Encourages the imagination and brings another dimension to creative play. Imaginative play also helps children learn social, practical and lateral problem solving strategies which then can be transferred into the adult world.

Other Ideas for using bottle tops :

Creative Play – Mini Cupcakes

Imaginative Play – Baker’s Shop